Image credit: Financial Action Task Force (FATF)
A new report by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) highlights persistent and evolving terrorist financing (TF) risks, and aims to help competent national authorities, the private sector, non-profit organisations and other relevant stakeholders better understand the nature of global and context-specific TF threats, and mitigate them more efficiently.
Highlighting that the financing methods used by terrorists vary considerably depending on contextual factors and their target goals, the report offers a granular analysis of the ways in which terrorists exploit vulnerabilities of many economic and non-commercial sectors and services, and reflects on the anticipated evolution of these trends over the next few years, underscoring TF dynamic nature and adaptability.
Experts from France and the United Nations Counter-Terrorism Committee Executive Directorate (CTED), with the support from the FATF Secretariat, co-led the preparation of this report with over 30 project team experts from across the FATF Global Network, including other UN entities with observer status to the FATF. This work attests to a coordinated approach in analyzing evolving global and context-specific TF trends and supporting Member States in this regard.
The report was adopted at the FATF¡¯s recent and includes case studies spanning over the past 10 years to provide a comprehensive overview of the factors influencing TF risks, based on contributions from over 80 FATF Global Network jurisdictions, published reports of the FATF, United Nations entities and other intergovernmental organizations, extensive research, and analysis of over 800 submissions from the private sector, academia and think tanks following a targeted public consultation.
The conclusions and recommendations of the report usefully incorporate and build upon the requirements of relevant Security Council resolutions and guidance from the Counter-Terrorism Committee, including its 2025 Non-binding guiding principles on preventing, detecting and disrupting the use of new and emerging financial technologies for terrorist purposes, (referred to as the ¡°Algeria Guiding Principles¡±), as well as CTED¡¯s analytical work on countering the financing of terrorism (CFT).
The report includes references to various terrorist organizations which have been designated either by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), or through regional and national designations regimes developed pursuant to resolutions 1373 (2001) and 2462 (2019) for the purposes of asset freezing. As such, mentioning of an organization in the analysis or case studies included in this report does not entail or imply the endorsement of any national or regional designations by the United Nations (UN). Moreover, jurisdictions remain sovereign in their determination as to whether to incorporate regional or other national asset-freezing lists domestically, should they meet their own designation criteria, and pursuant to their own legal and regulatory frameworks. References made in the report based on regional or national designations regimes do not entail or imply the endorsement of any national or regional designations by any other jurisdictions.
On 22 July, FATF hosted a webinar to discuss the key outcomes of the report and the way forward to address the evolving threats. For more information and to access the full recording of the webinar, in English and in French, please visit:
For further details on the key outcomes of the report, please visit
To read the full report, please visit
For more information on CTED¡¯s CFT work, please visit: /securitycouncil/ctc/content/countering-financing-terrorism